Mitch Epstein: Family Business

An American Dream destroyed: how a fire and one family’s financial demise echoed the city of Holyoke’s rapid decline

In the summer of 1999, two boys barely in their teens were so bored that they started a fire in a boarded-up apartment building in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The fire spread and engulfed an entire city block. Mitch Epstein’s father owned the building and was sued for ＄15 million, which he didn’t have. Epstein’s father also owned a once successful furniture store that now faced liquidation. Family Business is an epic work about the demise of a Jewish immigrant dynasty. It traces the fall of a New England town from industrial giant to drug-dealing capital in four chapters: ＂Store,＂ ＂Property,＂ ＂Town＂ and ＂Home.＂ As Andy Grundberg wrote in the New York Times Book Review, ＂This book elegantly and eloquently traces the decline of Holyoke, Massachusetts, a once prosperous industrial town, through the poignant example of Mitch Epstein’s own family’s declining fortunes and psychological disintegration.＂
Surprising, hard-hitting and haunting, the book includes photographs, video storyboards and stills, interviews and dialogues. In Family Business, Epstein has invented a unique mixed-media novel whose conceptual ambitions are matched by its fearless humanity. This is the 20th anniversary edition of a seminal photobook, which quickly became a model of complex visual storytelling.